Friday, May 01, 2020

Kidney Saga part 84

I'm still trying to deal with the back pain. It's causing me a lot of grief.

I managed to not pass out yesterday, staying awake and aware most of the time. I checked my blood pressure regularly, and the medication change already seems to be having the desired effect. My blood pressure never got seriously low, but it's still staying in the healthy range for the most part. It's a relief to have this thing apparently fixed. Passing out isn't fun.

It does seem sometimes that as soon as I manage to get one problem under control, another one pops up. I keep feeling healthier, then BLAM I'm fainting all over the place. Or my back hurts. I just want to be well enough to cook and bake and go up and down the stairs freely. I'm going to be stuck in this house for a long time, so I want to be able to at least move around it.

Today I start to taper off the prednisone. It's about time. If I understand what the nephrologist said, I should be completely off the stuff by the end of August - as long as my kidneys continue to improve. I can hardly wait, but I'll obey the doctors' orders on this one. I wonder when the "moon face" will start to fade?

The diabetes continues to be an ongoing problem as far as food and figuring out what I can and cannot eat goes. It should be simple, but the fact that pretty much all non-sugar sweeteners do not taste at all sweet to me makes it much more complicated than it ought to be. I wish I had normal taste buds. I would like to try more sweeteners, but I'm not sure how to get small samples. All the "natural" companies seem to be inclined to just sell you big bags, which we'd have to either throw away or make Eric use. Why doesn't someone put together a non-sugar sweetener sample for folks like me, so we can just try all of them and find out if any of them work?

With my concentration on the diabetes side of things, I've been neglecting the kidney side a little. I need to start paying more attention to potassium and phosphorus - although my potassium levels are still very low and my phosphorus is in a decent range. Staying low sodium hasn't been too difficult because I never added salt to my meals if I could help it anyway.

I was up at 3am again because of the back pain. It's just killing me. As I said, I've only ever been able to stop it once, this past summer during the Oz convention. And the "medication" that I used is not something I'm keen to add to my drug load at the moment - a CBD/THC topical cream. Still, I'm sorely (pun not intended) tempted to hit the Bake Shop in Prosser and get the cream and use it because my back hurts so bad. I wonder what my doctors would think?

In any case, I'm going to try to sit still and hopefully not be in as much pain today. We'll just have to see if it works.

Full Kidney Saga --- Start Here --- Kidney Wish List --- GoFundMe

1 comments:

Elayne said...

I can't stand most chemically-created artificia sweeteners, so stevia is my sweetener of choice. Robin started using it as well even before he found out he was diabetic too. We both swear by it.